5 Signs You Need a Technology Detox

Written byjoshua becker ·

When I grew up, idle time was spent reading, playing baseball with my neighbors, or tracking mud into the house. My parents consciously and constantly encouraged me to “be outside” and not “sit there” in front of the TV.

However, with the advent of smartphones and ever-present Internet access, I adapted. I purchased phones and computers, started websites and embraced social media. This ability to change is good. We continue making livings and feel connected with our current culture by participating.

But adaptation sometimes has unintended consequences.

As I type these words, my phone is silenced and turned over. Despite trying to avoid notifications and create a distraction-free zone, I am pulled towards it. It is, after all, sitting right next to me.

Its power remains—even if I don’t respond to the device. My brain shouts that there are unexpected joys and pleasant moments possible if I would only embrace the device and press the screen alive.

What news, messages, loves, and likes might I be missing?

Of course, opening my smartphone now would prevent me from writing these words. I might swim in the infinite Internet of news, posts, articles, and comments—losing track of time or intention.

I’ve done it before. Far too many times.

Setting my sights on an individual, meaningful news article, clicking a link within the content, and then searching through other stories the company personally recommends for me. The “suggested articles” never end.

Before I know it, 20 to 30 minutes is gone. Never to be regained again.

Companies have become incentivized to keep your attention for longer and longer periods of time. Google, Twitter, and Facebook employ teams of psychologists and human-computer interaction experts to find ways to modify behavior and hook you. Thirty minutes of your time—of billions of people’s—makes the marketers happy.

Tristan Harris, formerly a Design Ethicist at Google, talks about this as a consequence of the “attention economy.” And if companies have their way, we’ll be watching even more cat videos, sharing “shocking” stories, and commenting to “outrage.” Our personalities are invested in these processes now.

Taking a break, minimizing distractions, and embracing simplicity is difficult in today’s world. Most of us aren’t ready to ditch our smartphones or social media, the isolation isn’t worth the departure. Nor is avoiding technology entirely the answer.

Many of us seem to be struggling to moderate and balance technology use.

Here are Five Signs You Need a Technology Detox

1. You spend more time than intended.

Technology can be like quicksand, sticky and challenging to escape. Haven’t we have all gotten hooked after one article and stayed for another article, comment, or share? If you clicked on this article through Facebook, you might have accounted about 5-10 minutes of time. But what if you continued scrolling down your Facebook news feed afterwards? Before you know it, you’ve spent 15-20 minutes mindlessly scrolling. By setting intentional blocks of your schedule for checking, you might gain an awareness for your use and find ways to contain it.

2. You feel guilt/dissatisfaction afterwards.

When I eat a bag of chips, I immediately feel the salt on my tongue. Eventually, the saltiness dulls and oils remain. The residue remains on my fingertips. But when I overeat on these empty calories, I feel dissatisfied. Technology use has a similar reward-regret curve. Each site and article provides a little nugget of instant gratification. Too many, and I’m inclined to regret this use of time. Reflection is the best medicine for examining how you move forward in the world. If you’re filled with negative emotions, it might be time to ask, was that “time well spent?”

3. You are motivated by a fear of missing out.

My event invitations, messages, and updates from friends and friendly make it crystal clear: I don’t have a fear of missing out, as I’m always missing out on something. I’ve grown to embrace this truism. It’s freeing. There’s always more we can participate in, but time is limited and being more busy is not the answer. Minimalism is attractive to so many because, at its heart, it is about intentionally finding ways to embrace that which gives us meaning, while removing the distractions that keep us from it. We don’t have unlimited space or time or energy. And the sooner we own this reality, the sooner we’ll focus on what matters.

4. You experience urges to check.

Researchers have found interruptions lead to major delays in the completion of projects. On average, study participants took about 23 minutes to get back on task after a distraction. Potentially, that “important” email could mean 23 minutes from what’s meaningful. From phantom vibrations to wondering whether the screen just flashed on, the motivation to check our phones is one of the strongest adaptations. Proactive preventions from checking might help. For instance, you might choose to turn your phone off when socializing with loved ones or putting it on a do-not-disturb mode.

5. You never have enough time in your day.

Recently, I installed a little application (Moment) on my smartphone to track use. What I found still haunts me. I picked up my phone about 40 times, and spent nearly two hours working on emails, checking media, and text messaging. While some of that was purposeful work, distractions clearly continue to get me. At the end of days, it’s not uncommon to feel incredibly busy. This busyness and stress is real, but if you were to reduce smartphone usage, might it help you feel more calm and available for what matters?

Despite conscious efforts to minimize material goods, information and technology can weasel its way in, pushing out what matters. Taking intentional efforts to reduce your technology use might free up far more time than you realize for the things that matters most.

And isn’t that really the goal of all this? To live a life that matters.

About Joshua Becker

Writer. Inspiring others to live more by owning less.WSJ Bestselling author of The More of Less.

Comments

Once you realize how ‘engineered’ this all is, and the paths that you can be led down, well it’s a little scary. Maybe not quite tin foil hat scary, but starting to feel that way! I had recently read an article by Tristan (linked below) that really opened my eyes and has helped me to limit the time in social media, and make sure that I remain in control.

The struggle is real! My vice is Facebook (which is how I came across this article), and I have done a couple of things to limit myself. First, I don’t have Facebook on my phone. I am consciously forget my password, so I can’t even log on if I feel tempted. This way, I have to intentionally sit down at the computer and decide to look at FB instead of doing the work I sat down to do.
The second thing I have done is take a total Facebook hiatus, by deactivating my account. I wrote about what I learned from the experience here: http://whispersofworth.com/confessions-of-a-facebook-addict/. A few of my discoveries coincide with your points here.
Life is so much worthwhile spent living in the present with those around you instead of locked in a virtual world of acceptance and entertainment. As long as we have the world at our fingertips, it will continue to be a struggle, but it is one worth fighting for.

Yes! This is a struggle for me. I have taken hiatus from Facebook (it is my main addiction) during the months leading up to and following Christmas. It was wonderful! I felt more relaxed, I was able to focus more on the things I needed to get done, and to focus on the real meaning of Christmas. I will say though that I did feel like I missed out on some things. So much of the communications from the groups I’m involved in are through social media (church, school, etc). So, I have yet to find a way to use it only as a tool. It becomes too much of a crutch and time waster for me. I think I’ll take another hiatus over the summer:)

Facebook is bad for me, too. I have found, though, many of the pages I need information from are also public so you don’t need to sign in to look at it. My kids’ schools, our church, rec sports groups, the local donut shop, etc., have pages that I can access and then close without getting too involved. (If you want/need to comment then you would need to sign in.)

I also wonder if going directly to friends’ pages instead of scrolling through the feed would cut my time. I’ll have to try that. ;) You can also unfollow a person or group, but still be friends, so that their posts and actions don’t show up in your feed. I have done that with a few…

Your article hits the nail the nail on the head in all aspects. I found Facebook to be my nemesis. It wasn’t at all what it was intended to be. You can’t unsee everything that you scroll past even if you don’t want to read it. Then there also was too much nonsense. I know, just scroll past what you don’t want to see, but it doesn’t work as easily as that. So I deleted my account. My mind feels clearer, I have a LOT of time to do things that otherwise got pushed aside. Then there were the games, email, etc. It’s a never ending barrage of nothingness. I started reading actual books again. Now I sometimes forget to take my phone when I go out. I turn it off when I finish reading my emails, or articles that I’ve downloaded. It’s better. My husband would complain that I didn’t listen to him, cause my face was buried in the phone. Now he has my full attention when he talks to me. It’s better. Thanks so much for this article.

Thanks for the heads up on Moment. With all that is going on in our country in the past 6 months I’ve found myself spending WAY too much time on Twitter. As a result, I find myself spending less time living my values. I told my husband last week that I wanted to curb Twitter usage, but I know I’ve only curbed it slightly. Moment will hopefully give me the objective reminder I need so I can transition to spending more of my time doing what I really want and need to do instead of following the latest tweets from the NYTimes, Washington Post, etc.

Thank you for all you do to encourage those of us trying to live more intentional and less stuff focused lives.

During the Christmas period, I had a detox break from technology. One of the best things I have ever done! Learning to pick up a book, a magazine instead of my phone was much more fulfilling.http://www.flareaforte.com

Number 5 really struck me. I’m almost scared to install that app and see what I find about my own smartphone use. Its even more challenging, I think, when you work in the Internet world. I read e-books on my phone, respond to reader comments, and do some of my social media work on it. One helpful thing I’ve found for helping my kids understand my relationship with technology is to explain to them what I’m doing when I’m doing it. That way, they know that mommy is responding to a person, listening to a podcast, or reading a book, and not playing a game or something else they might associate with technology. Still, it’s all about finding balance, which is so challenging in our technology oriented world.

Great stuff, as usual.
One of the best decisions I’ve made recently was to silence all the alerts on my phone (outside of phone calls and texts). This has allowed me to better filter what info I let into my life, while allowing me to ignore a lot of the negative and inconsequential “info”.
Still, it’s tough to ignore the temptation of scrolling through several apps when I have a few extra minutes. The 23 minute stat will hopefully jump to the forefront of my brain the next time I think about checking Twitter!

Thank you so much for sharing this post :) It really is important to spend time away from technology and social media as there’s so much more to life. I’ve recently stopped spending less and less time on it which has really improved my level of happiness.

The struggle is real! I’ve always been an information junkie, so a smartphone is my heroin.
I’ve been really working on limiting the distraction of my phone. I keep it my bedroom when home, rather than on me. I’ve turned off a huge slew of notifications. I deleted the Facebook app. I often set the timer when I’m browsing. I keep a book to browse nearby. All this has helped a lot. Still a challenge though and something that takes active work.

So many of the seemingly innocent diversions and pleasures in life can steal away our time. Before social media, it was television. My sense is “all things in moderation.” Take note of your use habits and adjust if excessive.

Another one, of those article. The bell has been rung for a while, and now it won’t stop. I just can’t keep ignoring this, even if it reveals, in the end, not to be much of an issue. Earlier today, I contemplated the topic at length, and posited that the question of whether technology harms one reaches as far as into trenches of whether we should all aspire to live by the values of the rich. I won’t go into detail, but my point is that this topic reaches way father than just what it addresses.
Another problem we seem not to discuss enough though, maybe because doing so isn’t financially sound, is that of the influx of so many self-improvement articles: Because of this, I struggle greatly to focus on working towards ONE goal. Today, I might be thinking about trying to work on my attention span (technology detox), but by the time I go to bed, I will have (unwittingly) read at least 5 other articles that managed to wedge in things pertaining to self help. It’s very infuriating, because I love reading articles; but I don’t want to be ‘trapped’ within the confines of the self all the damn time. What happened to leisurely reading?

Thanks for the good points you have made. But we all have stuff we want others to learn or know about, hence constant checking of our social media accounts. I enjoy twitter very much because of the restricted characters.

So many refer to “detox”, technology vacations, forgetting passwords, MOMENT; all designed to re-establish a sense that one is in control and that there is a greater purpose to our lives. Technology, and the “need” to know what’s happening is, indeed, for many, an addiction. We can officially list this addiction along with all the others. Reality strikes again! Like competing against a unique athlete in sports, you try and contain/limit the damage they incur. In the end there is no stopping them.

I agree with the commenter a few comments above, who found herself on Twitter a lot more in the past 6 months, due to nationwide issues that have gone on since then. I too, have had to take mini breaks over time and not be on Twitter.

I do not subscribe to any social media. I am always met with a look of shock when someone finds out. This is another reminder to keep it that way. I am able to fully attend online challenges-like the Uncluttered Challenge right now.
Advertisers have been using psychological tactics for years, which have hooked me. I’m glad I’ve at least avoided it here. I feel sad that there are so many struggles for people, because of it.

* I uninstalled all games, which I adjusted to very quickly.
* I uninstalled all social media apps, except google hangouts and facebook messenger because 2 of my close friends are more comfortable with them than SMS for some reason. I’ve managed not to use them idly so I’m ok with having the exception.
* I uninstalled almost every app that could be done just as well with a web browser, because if I don’t *really* need it I’ll probably be too lazy to find it with a web browser.
* I’ve even uninstalled the kindle app, and I seem to be surviving without it.

So now my phone is simply a tool (and an mp3 player).

Problem is, it’s still in my head that my phone is a solution to boredom, and while I’ve gotten pretty good at resisting if I do succumb to the urge to check my phone out of idleness or boredom I just feel yuck. I have to have my phone on me all the time (for medical reasons) so I guess I just have to push through until I view it more like a music-playing screwdriver or something.

I cannot find the social longterm benefits to remaining so connected. It baffles me that people spend between 5-8 hours on their devices every day. How many parents have missed their child’s first steps? How many moments have been ruined with a loved one because someone thought their phone vibrated?

Yes! I recently took a one week break from my blog and social media (so good!) and wrote about finding space for my soul to breathe in which I link to a couple helpful podcast episodes that speak to your topic. My plan is to take a week off every two months. I’m currently reading “The Future of Happiness: 5 Modern Strategies for Balancing Productivity and Well-Being in the Digital Era” in case this sounds appealing to others :)

I really need this! Social media and internet are addicting and it’s not surprising to find myself wasted hours scrolling, reading, or watching a YouTube video. But I’m working hard on limiting myself, though. Today, I feel great for spending my day being productive between working for a few hours at work and cleaning the house.

Exactly, i would say that people are getting more towards internet and social media today instead of other things like alcohol. This is really ruining the future of people linked with him/her.
Though i am not an addict but i want people to use these things for limited periods and start giving time to family.

Maybe because I was old enough (early 30) when social media came into this world i never felt i need it and thats still the way… hopefully will keep this way as kids are growing. But oldest is 7 and never asked for tv or phone so far…

Just answer a simple question yourself: “Does I own the tool or does the tool own me?” Maybe that can helpful to decide…

Such a great post, thank you. I just challenged myself by turning my phone on airplanemode and put it in my nightstanddrawer, but I am still on my computer. Found your blog through blogging myself, then getting an email about it being qualified for blogster – which I had never heard of ten minutes ago. Internet really is a black hole. But i needed your post right now, so I’m gonna put down my computer and read my book instead.

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